Culture

'All Music Magazines Are Men's Magazines'

By Spencer Kornhaber
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

That’s what NPR’s music critic Ann Powers proposed on Twitter today, an idea that dovetails with what I wrote yesterday about Conde Nast buying Pitchfork  for its “very passionate audience of Millennial males.” To recap: Pitchfork employs a number of female critics and covers all sorts of artists—and yet to a lot of advertisers, what matters is that it has an overwhelmingly male readership.

This fits with the history of rock magazines, Powers wrote: “In advertising terms all music mags have been classified as men’s mags since the early 1970s at least. … This is a bigger issue, transcending one dude’s quote. If you look at 1970s rock mags they are very close to Playboy/Penthouse in many ways.” She pointed out that Spin was founded by the son of Penthouse’s founder, Blender was spun off of Maxim, and mags like Creem often took cues from Playboy.

With the hashtag #allmusicmagsaremensmags, Powers shared some choice findings from ‘70s rock rags:

Jezebel’s Julianne Escobedo Shepherd jumped in:

Back to Powers:

About the Author

Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic.